Tag Archives: SkyDrive

In every IT office I have worked in pulling pranks co-workers has been a standard. They tend to be low tech; co-worker leaves computer unlocked you change their background, maybe change their Windows sound affects. They tend to be small and easy to revert.

Over the summer in our office we had an intern program and a specific intern who wasn’t very wise when it came to locking his computer. We got him probably 10-15 times with picture of David Hasselhoff in a thong. We also installed some fun Google Chrome add-ons that would change every image on the page to something else.

These got boring; which is very unusual when making someone have a sexy background. However because we became so board with it we decided to take it a step further. We thought, wouldn’t it be cool to automate this with PowerShell? So our initial idea was changing the background to a random image. Looking through the ways of doing that was semi-complicated and I was feeling lazy. So we ditched the idea and it was on the back burner for a long time.

One evening I came home from work and stumbled upon this amazing post on the PowerShell Sub-Reddit “A fun script for Friday – make your friend’s computer start talking to him/her.” To sum it up, it’ll use Text to Speech to have the computer talk. In the example that was posted it used PowerShell Remoting. Using PowerShell Remoting for such a malicious intent may cross a line, depends on who the target is and how much you abuse it. In my case the computers were not domain joined and so I couldn’t use that as easily. So I decided to take my Friday night and make it quite a bit more “portable.”

Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to be sent to Microsoft TechEd by the company I work at. It was such a busy week and another week of catching up with real life I am just now getting around to blogging about TechEd.

Warning: Long blog post!

This summarization of TechEd does not do a justice to how fantastic the experience is and how much you learn while there.Read more »

Next week we have the first Indianapolis PowerShell User Group meeting and I was tasked with getting the survey for our meetings setup. I did not want to follow the standard here is a piece of paper please fill out and turn back in. So I decided to use the “cloud” way of passing out surveys.

The nice thing about SkyDrive is the Office Web Apps. These web apps include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. With Excel you are able to create Survey’s and provide anyone the link. These surveys are saved in an Excel document and synced with any computer that you have SkyDrive running on. These documents are being saved to my local machine gives me the ability to execute a PowerShell script on them which will throw out winners from the list of people who submitted the survey.